I'm Forrest Carr, novelist, blogger, land snark, and former TV news director and talk radio host. I tackle politics, cats, the media, paranormal psychology, dreams, God, guns, evolution, rat bastards, and anything else that might make you think or laugh, maybe even simultaneously. And, oh yeah, I have cancer, which makes me the Walter White of bloggers. You have been warned.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Oh, my God. Is it happening? This was supposed to be fiction!

This novel doesn't have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. It's the other way around. Real events are ripping headlines from the novel. There were two more this week.

Violent flash mobs hit the
streets? Check.

Jetliners falling out of the sky,
under the control of homicidal maniacs? Check.

Sleeping sickness erupts?
Check.

World goes mad? Zombie
apocalypse to follow? Stand by.

Coast To Coast AM listeners heard
these predictions just last month. Readers of my novel, A
Journal of the Crazy Year, saw them even sooner.

In February Coast To Coast AM host
George Noory had me on
the program to talk about these predictions, former TV news director and
author to former TV new director and author. Is the world going crazy and
if so how bad will it get? And could the zombie apocalypse really
happen? One of the things we talked about is a topic that George has some
expertise on: The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, a
subject on which he has co-authored a book. A lot of people, me
included, suspect the disappearance could have been the act of a deranged,
suicidal pilot.

This was just fiction....

The photo at right is from the
back cover of the print edition of my novel. Does the incident look familiar? It's a
depiction of a scene where an airline pilot commits an act of
suicide/mass murder for reasons that were strictly personal, not
terroristic. In the plot it’s one of the first signs of the madness to
come. At the time, it was fictional. The first published edition of
the novel predated the crash of that Malaysian Airlines flight. And then
what do we have this week? A confirmed incident of pilot suicide/mass
murder in Europe.

Listeners to George's show heard
it first that this could happen, and would happen if current
trends continue.

What else did we talk
about? The idea in the novel that a zombie apocalypse could really happen
was inspired by a real-life pandemic that struck a hundred years ago.
Some of the victims became hyperviolent. The first symptoms manifested
themselves in the form of a sleeping sickness—victims who fell asleep and never
woke up. No cause for the disease, dubbed encephalitis lethargica,
was ever found. No method of transmission was ever found. The
disease disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived, without any human
intervention, after claiming about a million victims. My point on the
show was that if you allow me the leeway to suggest the disease cold come back
in a much more virulent form—which it certainly could, having struck twice
before, with the second outbreak exponentially worse than the first—then yes, a
zombie apocalypse like the one laid out in the book could happen.

And how’s this for sending a
chill down your spine: During its first
outbreak at the end of the 19th century, the disease was known by another
name: The Living Death.

... or so I thought.

Well, guess what. A sleeping sickness has now appeared. Or reappeared, as the case
may be. It’s happening in Kazakhstan;
the headlines are as fresh as your morning paper. Does this sound familiar: people are falling asleep. They can’t wake up. Doctors are baffled. In the village of Kalachi, population 600, one
person in four has been affected. It
strikes without warning—the victim can be in bed or walking down the street; it
makes no difference. Some victims
report mental disorders, including hallucinations. Now, “everyone is afraid of sleeping,” says
one villager.

So far no one appears to have
made the connection to encephalitis lethargica. You're hearing it here first. I did a great deal of research on the disease
for my novel (the prologue for which is non-fiction) including time spent in a
university medical library. Trust
me: the last outbreak of this pandemic
started out almost exactly the same.
Maybe this new eruption, whatever it is, will be less severe and will go away without claiming
mass numbers of victims. Maybe it won’t, and will act more like the
second outbreak of EL, affecting upwards of a million people. Some of those went violently psychotic, and
tens of thousands had to be institutionalized for the rest of their lives.

Maybe it’ll affect more people,
as depicted in the novel. Let’s hope
not; the book was intended as intriguing and thought-provoking but ultimately
escapist entertainment, not as prophecy.
But it’s definitely true that readers—and Coast To Coast AM listeners—heard
this vision of the future before it happened. Not to alarm you—well, okay, maybe
to alarm you a little bit—but the reality of what happened after the last
outbreak of sleeping sickness is just as scary as the thought of a zombie
apocalypse. What followed was the Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed—you know
what, I’ll let you look it up.

People are talking about
this. Last night (Thursdsay, March 26) sales of the novel
peaked at #35 in its category. Publishers Weekly described it as a “fascinating read” from top to bottom. Take it
from this starving novelist: Critical praise and rising
sales are welcome. Rising incidents of
illness and psychotic violence are not.
Let’s hope this remains nothing but intriguing fiction.

###

Find out more about A Journal of the Crazy Year, see reader and critic reviews,
and get a free download of that prologue here.